Year of the Penguin

Is it ever right to just wind up and let someone have it with all you’ve got? That’s a question that I think has to be asked. It’s certainly possible that we’ve all become too used to unrestrained rhetoric as a form of entertainment, and people like me live right in the middle of the guilt parabola there. Most all of us are grownups and can handle extreme argument, but clearly some people are not, and obviously I’m not just talking about Jared Loughner. To see that, all you have to do is attend almost any family gathering, where once-loving relationships have been completely lost because of the overheated right-left culture war. If real family relationships are being lost to this kind of political debate, if someone on TV can reach into your living room and break up your family without knowing anything about you or even knowing that you exist, that tells us that this mechanized mass-media rhetoric has been almost unimaginably successful at dehumanizing whole classes of people.

—The Giffords Tragedy: Is the Media Partly at Fault? | Rolling Stone Politics | Taibblog | Matt Taibbi on Politics and the Economy. Thanks to Reihan for the link. (via ayjay)

(via ayjay)

Marriage, in what is evidently its most popular version, is now on the one hand an intimate ‘relationship’ involving (ideally) two successful careerists in the same bed, and on the other hand a sort of private political system in which rights and interests must be constantly asserted and defended. Marriage, in other words, has now taken the form of divorce: a prolonged and impassioned negotiation as to how things shall be divided. During their understandably temporary association, the ‘married’ couple will typically consume a large quantity of merchandise and a large portion of each other.

—Wendell Berry (via ayjay) (via notyetalready) (via papertowngirl)

You can get thousands of people to sign up for a donor registry, because doing so is pretty easy. You have to send in a cheek swab and — in the highly unlikely event that your bone marrow is a good match for someone in need — spend a few hours at the hospital. Donating bone marrow isn’t a trivial matter. But it doesn’t involve financial or personal risk; it doesn’t mean spending a summer being chased by armed men in pickup trucks. It doesn’t require that you confront socially entrenched norms and practices. In fact, it’s the kind of commitment that will bring only social acknowledgment and praise. The evangelists of social media don’t understand this distinction; they seem to believe that a Facebook friend is the same as a real friend and that signing up for a donor registry in Silicon Valley today is activism in the same sense as sitting at a segregated lunch counter in Greensboro in 1960. ‘Social networks are particularly effective at increasing motivation,’ Aaker and Smith write. But that’s not true. Social networks are effective at increasing participation — by lessening the level of motivation that participation requires.

—Twitter, Facebook, and social activism : The New Yorker (via ayjay)

(via ayjay)

It’s really sary that a retin like Glenn Bek is one of the gatekeepers of what used to be alled ‘onservatism’ … Boy, it sure is good to know that a lever and reative lown like him is one of the prinipal framers of our national disourse on what it means to be really truly an Amerian itizen. I so believe he’s not just some hattering ukoo. For as we know, being onservative overs a multitude of sins and automatially makes you a ompetent and apable thinker and not a mere rabble-rousing lunati.

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Mark Shea (via ayjay)

— If it’s tough to read, Beck offers the decoding tool here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0OUXkZO8vE

• ”Deuteronomy”—Average Reader’s Rating: Three stars. I don’t get it. I’ve read most of the books in this series, and they totally kick butt, but this one leaves me scratching my head. Is there a story here? Am I missing something? Why so much talk about clean and unclean beasts? The author really got on a roll with Genesis and Exodus, and I was on the edge of my seat when I read The Book of Numbers. But this one runs out of gas early. Now I’m glad I skipped Leviticus!

—Joe Queenan (via ayjay)